The Sufahä9 in Qur'än Literature: a Problem in Semiosis

The Sufahä9 in Qur'än Literature: A Problem in Semiosis Ebrahim Moosa (Cape Town) The linguists, whom one meets everywhere these days, explain that every transaction in our culture - our money and mathematics, our games and gar- dens, our diet and our sexuality - is a language; this, of course, is why one meets so many linguists these days. And languages, too, are simply invented systems of exchange, attempts to turn the word into the world, sign into value, script into currency, code into reality. Of course, everywhere,... there are the politicians and the priests, the ayatollahs and the economists, who will try to explain the reality is what they say it is. Never trust them; trust only the nov- elists, those deeper bankers who spend their time trying to turn pieces of printed paper into value, but never pretend that the result is anything more than a useful fiction. Of course we need them: for what, after all, is our life but a great dance in which we are all trying to fix the best going rate of exchange ...' Malcolm Bradbury, Rates of Exchange (London: Arena, 1983), 8. the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God... But now we see through a glass darkly, and the truth, before it is revealed to all, face to face, we see in fragments (alas, how illegible) in the error of the world, so we must spell out its faithful signals even when they seem obscure to us and as if amalgamated with a will wholly bent on evil/ Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose (London: Picador, 1983), 11. Introduction WHEN reading classical Muslim exegetes such as Ibn JaiTr al-Tabari (224/838-310/923) or Pakhr al-Dm al-Razi (544/1150-606/1209), it is diffi- cult not to notice what Clifford Geertz had described as the 'refiguration of social thought.'*) This phenomenon noted by Geertz is something that per- l) CLIFFORD GEERTZ, 'Blurred Genres: The Refiguration of Social Thought' in Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 19. Der Islam Bd. 75, S. l - 27 ©Walter de Gruyter 1998 ISSN 0021-1818 2 Ebrahim Moosa sists and vigorously confronts the modern scholar of the Qur'än. Not only is the cultural map in terms of which we understand the revealed scripture re- drawn (thanks to spectacular advances in social-scientific thought espe- cially linguistics and psychology), but there is an entire 'alteration of the principles of mapping/2) 'Something is happening to the way we think about the way we think/ says Geertz.3) A generation earlier, a similar point stated somewhat differently, was made by the Soviet language-philosopher and critic, Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (1895-1975). Bakhtin who made a major impact on modern language studies observed that in language the forces of dialogue struggle against the forces of monologue.4) The lastmen- tioned try to fix meaning and close the text. Intertexuality, where a chain of meanings extend well beyond the limits of a single text or a corpus of word- ings, allows for the articulation of other suppressed dimensions of the text. It is along these lines, that Fisher and Abedi asks: 'Can the poly semi c and nomadic meanings of a text such as the Qur'an overcome the unbewised efforts to reduce it to a monologic decree?55) French thinkers, like Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan, following the Swiss linguist de Saussure, gave a new impetus to our understanding of the workings of language. Language is not only a set of arbitrary and conven- tional signs but we cannot seem to "know anything outside the endless chain of substitutions that are signs.'6) In Derrida's words: 'from the moment that there is meaning there is nothing but signs. We think only in signs.'1) The end of the transcendental signifier threatens some of the most hallowed as- sumptions of logocentric modes of thinking.8) Logocentrism, that which is centered on the logos (speech, logic, reason, the Word of God), is any sig- 2) GEERTZ, op. cit., 20. 3) Ibid. 4) M. M. BAKHTIN, 'The Dialogic Imagination' in The Bakhtin Reader: Selected Writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev, Voloshinow, ed. Pain Norris (London: Edward Ar- nold, 1994), 75. 5) MICHAEL M. J. FISCHER & MEHDI ABEDI, Debating Muslims: Cultural Dia- logues in Postmodernity and Tradition, 148; see also ANDY RIPPIN, 'Reading the Qur'an with Richard Bell/ Journal of the American Oriental Society, 112 (4), 1992, 639-647,esp. 637. 6) G. DOUGLAS ATKINS, ReadingDecoristruction, Deconstructive Reading (Lexing- ton, Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky, 1983), 46; CARL RASCHKE, 'The Deconstruction of God/ Deconstruction and Theology, Thomas J. J. Altizer et al. (eds.) (New York: Crossroad, 1982), 7-8. 7) JACQUES DERRIDA, Of Grammatology, (trans.) Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak (Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 50. 8) ATKINS, op. cit., 40. The Sufahä* 3 nifiying system governed by the notion of self-presence of meaning; i.e., any system structured by a valorization of speech writing, immediacy over dis- tance, identity over difference, and (self-)presence over all forms of absence, ambiguity, simulation, substitution, or negativity9) Recent studies on the intellectual history of Islamic discourses show that there was a growing propensity towards logocentrism betweeen the first and fifth Islamic centuries.10) This was the result of a shift in the religious paradigm, where Islam graduated from being a minoritarian keryg- matic faith at first, into a triumphalist ethos of empire. The cultural pro- duction of Muslim intellectuals of that period was the main repository which reflected these socio-cultural changes. Since then logocentrism has dominated Islamic thought with very little challenge.11) As a matter of course, logocentrism reduces the political, anthropological, cultural deter- minants of language to a secondary importance in the general approach. Islamic discourses exhibit a longing for presence, for a constitutive reason (logos) and for an order of concepts claimed to exist in themselves, com- 9) Barbara Johnson, translator's note 1, in JACQUES DERRIDA'S, Dissemination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 4. 10) A KEVIN REINHART, Before Revelation: The Boundaries of Muslim Moral Thought (Albany: State University of New York, 1995), 178. Reinhart only illus- trates a scenario in intellectual history, but it is my interpretation that it was a move towards logocentrism. 11) For some works that challenge logocentrism see MOHAMMAD ARKOUN, Pour une critique de la raison islamique (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1984) and Essais sur lapensee islamique (Paris: Masonneuve et Larose, 1984); also see RICHARD MAR- TIN, 'Islamic Textuality in Light of Poststructuralist Criticism/ in A Way Prepared: Essays on Islamic Culture in Honor of Richard Bayly Winder (New York & London: New York University Press, 1988); "ÄDIL FAKHÜRI, TZra al-Dilalah einda *l-Arab: Di- räsah Muqaranah ma 9l-simya al-hadltha (Beirut: Dar al-Taliah li *l-Tiba'ah wa al- Nashr, 1985). It is interesting to note that the Japenese scholar of Islam, Toshihiko Izutsu, favoured aspects of Derridian deconstruction, but pointed out that as long as we used language we cannot get out of logocentric methaphysics. [T. IZUTSU and H. LANDOLT, 'Sufism, Mysticism, Structuralism: A Dialogue', in Religious Traditions, 7—9 (1984—86), 6.] Norris also admits that deconstruction cannot hope to break with the philosophical discourse of modernity, namely logocentric reason, or a metaphysics of presence. Only by working within that logocentric discourse, its constitutive aporias and blindspots can deconstruction effectively reveal what has been suppressed. [CHRISTOPHER NORRIS, Reconstruction, post-modernism & the visual arts/ in What is Deconstruction (New York/London: Academy Edition & St. Mar- tin's Press, 1988); also see G. DOUGL.AS ATKINS, 'The Sign as a Structure of Difference: Derridean Deconstruction and Some of its Implications,' in Semiotic Themes, Ri- chard T. de George (ed.) (Lawrence: University of Kansas Publications, 1981)]. 4 Ebrahim Moosa plete, self-referring and proper which regularly return to an origin or to a 'priority3. One of the unaccomplished tasks of scholarship is to provide an adequate account of the cultural imaginaire within which these ideas were constructed. In a critical 'close reading' of selective texts of Qur'an exegesis I wish to demonstrate that meanings of words change with the reconfiguration of social thought. For a genre of Qur'anic exegetical literature such as tafsir, it is important that we be in a position to map out and find out 'how' subtle shifts took place in the interpretive modes. To put it differently, we need know 'how' they mean.12) In order to demonstrate the process through which something functions as a sign to a perceptor-semiosis -13) I have examined selective exegetical passages where the word al-sufahal4:) and its derivatives occurred in the Qur'an. Translators and commentators of the Qur'an have not accounted for the play of meaning of this word and its transmission from one anthropological context to another. This word had a particular meaning and role in the early Arab humanist milieu where gender, age and status played a de- termining role. How this word was subsequently refigured in the social imagination of successive contexts in a subtle manner needs to be explained. The value of post-structuralist theories is that it enables one to demonstrate how character, community, motive, value, reason, social structure, in short everything that makes culture, is defined and made real performances of language. The search for meaning resides not so much in our knowledge of literary texts themselves, as in the way they are read and interpreted. As Foucault put it: 'To know must therefore be to interpret.'15) Semiotics and deconstruction allows one to view the interplay of signs and clusters of signs.16) In other words, semiotics asserts its controversial 12) RICHARD C.

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